Where does the Trump team go next with its legal complaints? Nowhere fast
The US begins its long Thanksgiving weekend today in a state of political suspense. Just a week ago, President Trump’s ragtag legal team – consisting mainly of a copiously sweating Rudy Giuliani and a conspiracy theory-spreading Sidney Powell – held a press conference that left a lot of viewers open-mouthed. As hair dye poured down his forehead, Giuliani claimed that the US had experienced its biggest assault on democracy of all time; meanwhile, Powell went on to say that communist voting machines made under the stern eye of (the deceased) Hugo Chavez in Venezuela were responsible for favouring Biden over Trump.
A day later, Powell appeared on Fox News and on the far-right fringe network Newsmax. The small network has suddenly come to international attention after Trump tweeted out his admiration for it, along with the similarly hardcore One America News. When Fox joined other respectable networks and declared Biden the democratic winner of the election, Trump’s love affair with it abruptly ended. Even Tucker Carlson, a notorious Fox News host known for railing against “political correctness”, feminism, and Black Lives Matter, ended up criticising Sidney Powell on air after that now infamous press conference, saying that she needed to produce evidence for her claims or stop making them.
Powell’s Newsmax appearance was surprising even by the standards of 2020. During that interview, she continued the “commie Venezuelan voting machines” narrative and speculated that Georgia governor Brian Kemp – who is a Republican and a long-time ally of Trump’s – might have taken a bribe to certify the results as a Biden win. It led to a flurry of social media mockery and a next-day disavowal by Trump, who announced that she was “not part of the Trump legal team” (despite having tweeted a week earlier that she was). Like a lot of lawyers who flirted with the idea of joining Trump’s clearly ill-fated effort to overturn the results of the election, Powell had lasted about five minutes.
Out of the 22 lawsuits the Trump team filed on election day, 19 have now either been lost or withdrawn, with three pending. Earlier this week, a major Pennsylvania effort was thrown out. Many have pointed out that the team’s strategy has been left wanting: while Giuliani, who hasn’t actually appeared in a courtroom since the early 1990s, argues at press conferences that there was “major voter fraud”, he hasn’t claimed fraud in front of judges. As the team continues to haemorrhage qualified legal counsel, the whole charade begins to look more and more embarrassing.
To add insult to injury, Trump was forced out of the White House on Tuesday to perform the annual turkey pardoning, an event that became comical under the circumstances. He was supposed to regain some dignity with an appearance alongside Giuliani in the historical city of Gettysburg on Wednesday, but cancelled late after a member of his team was exposed to Covid.
Where exactly the Trump team goes next is anyone’s guess, but this week’s answer is “nowhere fast”. It’s clear the president isn’t done kicking and screaming, but the pram has passed the candy aisle now and the tantrum is having to come to an end. Eventually, one assumes, he’ll have to wipe his tears and toddle off to Mar-a-Lago. The real question is whether his fired-up supporters, fed on a diet of Newsmax and Twitter rage, will accept the transition of power in January as quietly.
Yours,
Holly Baxter
US opinion editor
